Little Big Man Read online

  Nan and Grandad know about my theory and sometimes I ask them what door Uncle Jamie might be choosing today. I like it when they say, ‘The day you were born,’ and tell how he came to see me in hospital, to make up for the fact that Dad had already gone off. ‘And he was so proud to be an uncle and he put you in that tiger suit, and you were so cute with so much hair!’ Nan’s told me that story loads of times but I still like it and the door game cheers my nan up because it means she only remembers the good days of her son’s life. I never ask her what doors he’d walk straight past.

  My uncle Jamie died jumping off a bridge. The bit of water he jumped into wasn’t deep enough and his spinal chord broke. If your spinal chord breaks, you can die, easily, because the blood and messages can’t get to your brain, which means it stops working, which means your body dies but not your soul. I know this because Teagan told me, whereas nobody in my family likes talking about what happened to my uncle Jamie. Nan always says, ‘All you need to know is that he was taken – he didn’t just die, Zac – and he should be here.’

  Mum used to say that too, but now she just says she’d rather talk about the good memories than him dying off a bridge.

  When Grandad and I go fishing, that’s when we have our best chats. Grandad tells me stories about the glory days in Grimsby when the fishermen used to get drunk all the way to Iceland! Now he has to work in an office in a factory and he misses fishing; that’s why he likes going with me.

  One day last summer – the day we caught the trout – I asked him to tell me how Uncle Jamie died, and after he went quiet for a long time, he told me about the bridge, and how Uncle Jamie’s spinal chord broke. Then I asked him some more questions: ‘Did he just jump?’ ‘Why did he jump if there wasn’t enough water? Could he not see?’ ‘Was he murdered?’

  Grandad said it was just a terrible accident but that I must never tell Nan he said that. I swore on our trout that I wouldn’t, but I still didn’t understand why, if that was the truth. That’s when he told me how truth can be different for different people. Say, when me and Teagan found the ten-pound note in the lift and we spent it on sweets, if she told the story back to people in a way that I thought had all the facts wrong and wasn’t what had happened at all, that would make me mad and upset and that’s how Nan would feel if she heard Grandad’s version.

  After we’d been to the cemetery, we got fish and chips. Then we went back to Nan and Grandad’s but called in to the shop on the way, because I wanted to make Uncle Jamie’s lemon drizzle cake after tea. Nan’s got a whole book of his recipes at her house and Mum’s got one at ours. You might think lemon drizzle cake is easy but it’s actually one of the hardest cakes you can make. You have to not bake it too hard otherwise it’s crumbly instead of squidgy and you have to put the drizzle on at just the right time.

  ‘Your uncle Jamie used to make a fine lemon drizzle,’ Nan said, pushing the greaseproof paper into the cake tin. That’s the hardest bit. She always has to do that for me. ‘Lemon drizzle, and coffee and walnut – those were his best cakes. But then obviously he was an absolute whiz at fish too. He could make fabulous sauces, Zac, better than you’d pay for in a restaurant.’

  Nan put the cake in the oven and I got to lick the bowl (that’s my favourite bit). I was thinking this might be a good time to ask my questions; I’d even decided how I could start. You see, as well as the heaven corridor, me and Teagan believe that how long you cry when someone dies shows how much you loved them.

  ‘Nan, how long did you cry when Uncle Jamie died?’ I asked when she’d started washing up.

  ‘Oh, a long, long time Zac. I still cry, even now.’

  ‘Do you think my dad would cry if my mum died?’

  I blurted it out because I was worried about saying it.

  Nan looked down at the soapy water for ages. ‘What an odd question,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Would he, though?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘Do you think Mum would cry if Dad died then?’ I asked and she looked a bit mad then.

  ‘Like I said, I don’t know, Zac.’ She took the bowl off me to wash up, even though there was still loads of cake mixture left and I hadn’t finished. ‘And to be perfectly honest, I don’t care either. I have no interest in that man or what he thinks or feels about anything and neither should you – he’s not worth it.’

  Nan doesn’t like my dad because he abandoned us. She says he’s a waste of space. But I think he can’t have been, not if my mum loved him so much, because she’s got good taste, my mum; she knows what a good person is.

  ‘But why did he even leave,’ I said, ‘if he still loved my mum?’

  ‘Zac, please, that’s enough,’ snapped Nan, turning off the taps. ‘What’s with all the questions all of a sudden?’

  But I’d started now and so I had to finish.

  ‘But, like, even if he didn’t want to be my dad, he still loved my mum and she loved him, didn’t she? So why did he leave us all?’ I wanted so bad to tell her what Mum had said but I didn’t dare – I didn’t even dare tell Mum what she’d said yet, in case she took it back.

  ‘How do you know, Zac, if …’ Nan’s eyes had gone all teary and I really did not want to make Nan cry. ‘Your mum and your father were very young, they didn’t know what they felt.’

  I didn’t really understand or believe it. It felt like Nan was trying to palm me off. I was only ten but I knew what I felt. I knew I loved Mum, Nan and Grandad – even Teagan in a best-friend-who’s-a-girl kind of way – so why would my parents not know? They were miles older than me. The question I was thinking now, though, was, never mind him doing a runner, why did Mum let him if she loved him so much? And if they loved each other then, why couldn’t they now?

  After I’d finished baking with Nan, I went and watched telly with Grandad. It was a history programme all about the First World War. It showed all the soldiers in the trenches – they had to sleep there, even when it had been raining and it was so muddy that the mud came up to their thighs. Some soldiers saw their friends’ legs being blown off right in front of their eyes, or even half their face. I like history at school and watching Horrible Histories and learning all the facts, but sometimes I find it hard to believe that what they say happened actually did; that they are actually facts. It’s the same with everything that happens that you’re not there to see. It’s like a parallel universe – but if you’re not there, how can you be sure it exists? What if it’s all a lie, just to make a good story?

  Grandad says it’s important to remember that we could all just be a speck on someone’s shoe. We think we’re these important people living on earth, the most important place in the universe – but what if we’ve got it wrong? And what if Nan, Grandad and my mum had got my dad wrong too? What if Dad was somewhere, knowing the real reason he just left, and nobody had bothered to ask him?

  Nan came into the lounge then, and saw what me and Grandad were watching. ‘Mick, is this really suitable for Zac?’

  It was showing a soldier being blown up – but it was only actors, you could tell. Grandad started to explain this to her, but I wasn’t really listening because I was thinking about my dad. I was thinking how the only way I was going to find out the truth – and not just have to trust what everyone was telling me – was to find him myself and ask him in person. The letter was one thing, but I only really wrote that because I’d wanted him to come and help us. Now it was almost like I wanted to help him; to give him a chance to explain himself. I started to get dead excited when I thought about it. The feeling grew in my belly and bubbled right up to my smile. If I found my dad, then maybe him and Mum could be in love again and Mum wouldn’t have to go on any more crap dates and maybe he’d even change his mind about being my dad.

  ‘Zac,’ said Nan. ‘What are you grinning at?’

  Maybe Nan would even change her mind about him too?

  Chapter Four

  Mick

  ‘Find a place where you can be on your own,�
� Carol had said at our session last week. ‘Somewhere you can think. And make it a regular thing to go there – a regular meeting with yourself.’

  Carol’s my counsellor. (Now that’s something I never thought I’d say.) But I like her; I liked her the moment we met, at my very first session back at the beginning of January.

  I’d originally gone to the doctor in the November. Juliet and Zac were struggling; Zac in particular was low and just not himself. The feeling this was all my fault seemed to have reached crescendo levels, which I could no longer get even the shortest respite from. ‘I’ve lost the plot,’ was the phrase I used in the doctor’s surgery and he, unperturbed, suggested ‘talking therapy’.

  I must have looked like a rabbit in headlights that first time, but Carol put me at ease immediately. She was not how I imagined a ‘therapist’ to be. She’s no-nonsense, she gives great advice, and already, I must admit, I feel a sense of release sitting here in the Jubilee Cafe, my old greasy spoon down the docks where I’d have a fry-up before we went to sea. Today seems as good as any to start going over everything, and I mean really going through everything that’s happened. Putting the events in some order and holding them up to examine them.

  I need to understand how we got to this point; how our son isn’t here anymore and why I couldn’t protect him. How I let both our kids down. Sixty years old may not sound old, after all, but when you’ve hammered your body like I have, when your own dad dropped dead at sixty-two and you’ve used up as many lives as I have after twenty-five years at sea, it begins to feel it, believe me. And I need to understand what happened before it’s too late. Zac’s already asking questions and he deserves the truth. I love that kid more than life itself. It scares me how much.

  I think I’ll start with Lynda since, as I say, she’s a big part of everything.

  I met her in the summer of ’76 – the ‘hottest summer on record’ as it will be known for evermore. Cleethorpes was like the Costa del Sol. The fishing industry in Grimsby had begun to decline at that point – it was way past its heyday of the fifties, my old man’s era, when Grimsby was the centre of the world. But there were still two hundred or so trawlers and work to be got if you knew people, and the pubs of Freeman Street were always rammed. I’d just got back from a really good trip. We’d made three hundred boxes and I had fourteen hundred pounds burning a hole in my back pocket. They used to call us the ‘three-day millionaires’, because we’d be away fishing for three weeks, only to come back for three days, spending most of it (the time and the money) in the pub.

  They say you meet someone when you’re least expecting it, and I couldn’t have been expecting it less, still in my ducksuit, the only shower I’d had in a fortnight being a saltwater one, but there she was, my future wife, standing outside the White Knight in a sheer cream blouse, hair a halo of blonde. I thought Farrah Fawcett had landed in Grimsby. I thought I stood no chance too, but I was much cockier in those days before life and booze had knocked the bravado out of me. I think my opening line was, ‘What’s a classy girl like you doing hanging around a place like this?’ Not very original. She was called Lynda Cruickshank, she told me – Lynda with a ‘y’, the ‘posh’ way – and she was a ‘meggie’; that is, she was from Cleethorpes not Grimsby. Her dad did something in tax investigation – clearly she was a cut above – but she told me she ‘liked a bit of rough’, and there was ‘something romantic about sailors’.

  By some miracle we ended up kissing that night and I walked her home – still in the ducksuit. She said she was likely to fancy me even more if I cared to have a bath before our ‘next date’ and I remember grinning at that phrase: ‘next date’. ’Course, two dates turned into ten, turned into a wedding and two kids, but I suppose I’ve always thought it was a miracle that it did – I’ve never felt I was good enough for her. I’ve always believed that one day she’d wake up, smell the coffee and be off.

  I told Lynda right from the start that I didn’t want kids. I said I didn’t like the snotty-nosed little rug rats, when nothing could be further from the truth because anyone will tell you, I’m a big kid myself. But I didn’t want to tell her that it was the responsibility that scared the living daylights out of me, the fear I’d turn out like my ol’ man: a drunk, a waste of space … That I just wasn’t up to the job. Turned out I was right on that front. Like father, like son.

  Anyway, she talked me round, or rather beat me down as she does with everything, and I went along with it because it was easier – and I loved her. She’s a difficult woman but I still love her.

  They say there are only two emotions in life, two reasons we do anything: fear and love; and it felt like a perfect storm of the two when Jamie and Juliet were born. I was in no way prepared for this explosion of the heart, and it was instant – with both my kids. It wasn’t a choice I made or anything I was in control of. It knocked me sideways, like sliding off the deck in a force-ten gale (and believe me, I’ve been there too and there’s sweet FA you can do about that either).

  Lynda always said she couldn’t describe the pain of childbirth; that it was unlike anything she’d ever known as pain. But that was how I felt about the love: that it wasn’t anything like love as I knew it. That it deserved a new word. It was the best feeling I’d ever had – and the most frightening.

  Obviously, I was in the pub when our Jamie was born – you just were back in those days. It was 1987. Plus, it was a Saturday and I was dead on my feet most of the time, working ten hours in the kipper factory skinning salmon, waiting for a new job to start, so I was damned if I wasn’t making the most of my weekends. I was down The Smokers with Vaughan Jones when my mum called the pub phone to tell me that my son was here, and to get down the hospital. It’s mad, dark, poetic even, to think now that the moment I heard my son had entered the world, I was having a pint with the man whose son would, eighteen years later, be the one to blame for him leaving it far too early. Lynda always did say, ‘Like father, like son’ – though, funnily enough, never when it came to me, only when it came to Liam – and she despised Vaughan for his drinking and his brawling and, more importantly, his leading me astray; towards the bottle and away from her. He’d spent time inside for GBH in the past and their family, as far as she was concerned, gave fishing families a bad name. ‘Nobody in their right mind would want to keep up with those Joneses,’ she used to say. She blamed Vaughan for corrupting me, but I never needed any encouragement.

  The first time I held my boy in my arms, I bloody cried like a baby myself. ‘Why is daddy crying?’ Juliet, who was two and a half at the time, said. Lynda laughed – she was still laughing back then. ‘Because he’s drunk!’ she said. Then, more to me than Juliet, ‘And happy, and scared out of his wits.’

  How it’s changed, down here at the docks, in the thirty or so years since my kids were born. What a crying shame. All the factories and the smokehouses closed down, the ice factory derelict. It only reminds you how much time you’ve let slip through your fingers and it’s all coming into focus now, now I don’t have the crutch of the booze, and enough time has passed that I can think of other things except Jamie for longer than five minutes. I feel like I fell underground, only to wake up several years later, crawl to the top and find everything gone.

  I’m thinking of my relationship with our Jamie now and shaking my head, because I realize most of it was conducted in the pub. Either he was hanging around outside the White Knight eating endless crisps while I got rat-arsed inside, or, when he was older, he was getting rat-arsed with me. We were close, best mates, Jamie and I – more than father and son. It’s only in the past few years that I’ve realized he needed me to be his father, not his drinking buddy.

  They used to serve you a pint with your breakfast at six on landing day at the TC’s Club, straight off the boat, and I remember once, when Jamie was about seven, Lynda bringing him down around eight because he couldn’t wait to see me, and the look of rage on her face when she saw I was half-cut. But then there were later times, when he
was a teenager; underage but nobody gave a toss back then. And those were good, fun times. Maybe we shouldn’t have been doing it, but they were still good times.

  The relationship with your son is completely different from that with your daughter. As I said, Jamie was my mate, my buddy. Juliet was, from the minute she was born, someone to be looked after. I knew a different Jamie from the one his mother knew: lovely, baby-faced Jamie who’d take his mum breakfast in bed (he knew which side his bread was buttered on). But he was different in the pub with the lads. He did stupid, irresponsible shit, the same as any lad his age. When he died, aged eighteen, he was already well on his way to becoming a chip off the old block and I think Lynda was always in denial about that. So quick to see it with Liam and yet incapable of seeing it with Jamie.

  What else? It was different with each of them right from the beginning. When I first held Juliet in my arms, there was just this surge of protectiveness. She was tiny – I couldn’t say what weight – but I just remember this need to keep her safe; and most of all to make sure that whichever man she ended up with, he’d love and protect her too. But that’s the difference with a daughter: you know one day she’ll love someone else more passionately than she loves you, and so right from the start, you’re already letting go. But with a boy, it’s different. They’re more an extension of you, more for keeps – at least I thought so. Turned out I took that for granted. And all I see when I close my eyes at night is our boy, lying dying with all those tubes in him on that hospital bed, the piston-puff of the ventilator; all I can hear is Liam pacing up and down outside and Lynda shouting, ‘I know you’re there. You’re not wanted here. Go! Get out!’

  Chapter Five

  Juliet

  Zac looks at his plate and then up at me. ‘What’s that for?’ he says.

  ‘What’s it for? It’s fruit,’ I say. ‘It’s nice. Look, I put it in a smiley face and everything.’